


7658

by besselfcn



Category: The Witcher (TV)
Genre: Captivity, Hurt/Comfort, Multi, Nightmares, Non-Consensual Haircuts, Non-Linear Narrative, Permanent Injury, Rape Aftermath, Rape Recovery, Suicidal Thoughts, Torture, Witcher Retirement
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-15
Updated: 2020-05-15
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:01:51
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,046
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24198658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/besselfcn/pseuds/besselfcn
Summary: If he pushes his hair flat and in just the right way, you almost can’t see the scar anymore.
Relationships: Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Jaskier | Dandelion/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg, Geralt z Rivii | Geralt of Rivia/Yennefer z Vengerbergu | Yennefer of Vengerberg
Comments: 40
Kudos: 283
Collections: Witcher Kink Meme (Dreamwidth)





	7658

**Author's Note:**

> For this wonderfully succinct kink meme fill: https://witcherkinkmeme.dreamwidth.org/429.html?thread=465581#cmt465581
> 
> Tagging a fic like this is hard; let me know if you feel I should add anything in particular.

If he pushes his hair flat and in just the right way, you almost can’t see the scar anymore. The big one, that runs from the crown of his head to the back of his ear, all thick and jagged and carved against the bone. The edge of it still peeks out beneath the hairline — it will for months, most likely. At least until the hair gets long enough to fall past his ears again.

There’s a bit in the middle that’s not quite right, too. He pushes the hair backwards to try again. Flattens it out. Still there. Once more, then — back, and front, tilt the head towards the sunlight to check —

“Geralt.”

He turns around and tries very hard not to scowl. From the look on Jaskier’s face, he hadn’t tried hard enough.

“Stop fussing with it,” Jaskier says softly. He’s always soft, now. Geralt feels he’s smothering in it. “It is neither good for your constitution nor pleasant for me to watch. You look as you always do: perfectly adequate. Now come on. Dinner’s on soon.”

Dinner, it turns out, is thick, warm slices of bread with fruit jam and small, easily handled hunks of cheese and meat. Geralt gives Yennefer a stern look as the servants place the plates before them; she winks, and picks up a piece of venison between her fingers to pop into her mouth.

He eats quietly; Jaskier, who has no notion of the concept, chatters away as always. About his latest poems, his greatest accomplishments, his worst enemies. He talks with his mouth full and his hands askew. Yennefer answers him, mostly with a look but occasionally with an actual word or a coerced bit of laughter. The chatter is like background noise; a familiar, oddly soothing litany to help wash down the bits of food that stick in Geralt’s throat.

“Oh,” Yennefer says, towards the end of the meal, in a voice that is not remotely an afterthought. “A letter from Vesemir arrived today.”

Geralt stops picking at his food. He looks up to her, jaw set.

“Quit trying to figure out which of us it was,” she says, “because it wasn’t either. You’re not stupid enough to think word didn’t travel.”

Geralt looks to Jaskier; he’s got his head down, tongue pressed behind his teeth. He’s not arguing with Yennefer about this, which means he’s _already_ argued with Yennefer about this, and this is the result of his losing.

“And what did the letter say,” Geralt asks.

“That you’re welcome at Kaer Morhen,” Yennefer says. She’s put her food down and cleaned her fingers on a napkin. “For as long as you like, winter or no. And that your guests are invited as well, though we’d have come anyway, so I’m not sure what the point of that was.”

He’d known this was coming, much as it churns his stomach. Jaskier himself had suggested the idea, weeks ago, when Geralt wasn’t in much of a state to argue with him but had done so anyway. It doesn’t explain the look on Jaskier’s face, like he’s bracing for a hit, or the restlessness that roils off of Yennefer in waves.

“What else did it say,” Geralt asks.

Yennefer stares at him.

“Yen.”

She pulls the letter from her sleeve and holds it across the table. Her expression is that practiced unreadability, a stone carving she learned young and early from her Rectoress.

He unfolds the letter and reads it, line by line.

“Geralt,” Jaskier says before he’s even done; the look on his face must be enough. Or the way his jaw sets, or the way his hand shake, his _fucking_ hands —

He stands and leaves, with Yennefer whispering _let him_ as he goes.

* * *

The stone floor scrapes his forehead.

This is what he remembers; these pinprick moments. The grinding of his skin against the rough granite, the way it scrapes and bleeds itself raw. The hand dug into the back of his thigh, fingertips pushed thick into the skin, like they think if they press hard enough they can rip out a chunk of the muscle. The rope around his neck, dimeritium-laced, pulling, pulling, tightening around his throat and straining makes it worse so he goes slack, he can’t breathe, he pushes his hands on the floor he can’t breathe he can’t breathe he can’t breathecan’tbreathe —

The man behind him pulls out and spills all over his back, searing hot against his skin, and with the release his grip on the rope slackens and lets Geralt breathe again, a raw and stuttering gasp of air that pushes color back into his vision as he groans around it.

 _Fuck_ , the man says, pushes his fingers back into Geralt with a sickening sound. _All these weeks, you’re still so tight._

He takes his prize, then. Knife to the scalp, a scrap of hair shorn off. Proof he bridled the White Wolf. He nicks the skin, not even enough to bleed.

Geralt remembers those moments. The noose, the orgasm, the knife. He doesn’t remember the pain; that’s all-encompassing, pressing over too many moments to be tied down to any particular one. He doesn’t remember the fear; he told himself to stop feeling that weeks ago. It wasn’t doing him any good.

He remembers how many bricks that cabin is made of and he doesn’t remember how many people met him there.

* * *

“Didn’t your mother ever teach you to clear your dinner plate before leaving the table.”

Geralt looks up from the armor he’s been doing a piss-poor job of shining to see Yennefer leaned against the door frame.

“Didn’t yours?” he says. She smiles.

“Look,” she says, which means she’s about to say something he won’t enjoy hearing, so he sets to scrubbing the chainmail harder. “I know this is all very fucking difficult and everything — “

“Aren’t you just a master of comfort.”

“ — but I didn’t give you Vesemir’s letter so that I could watch you mope over the notion that somebody actually gives a shit about you. I gave it to you because _I_ give a shit about you.”

Pain shoots from his wrist to fingertip; he hisses and drops the chainmail, then watches it lie there petulantly.

Yennefer sighs and sits beside him. The armory overlooks the gardens; from the bench where they sit side-by-side, he can see the beds of flowers pushing up for first spring, and beyond that her favorite apple groves, in perennial bloom.

“I love you,” she sighs, and he envies how casual she says it, as if it were that simple. “And worse, I know you. And as much as this has been where you needed to be--we can’t stay here, Geralt. You’ll rot here; you’re already rotting. A mage’s tower isn’t the place for you.”

Anger flares in his chest, a helpless thing. “And a Witcher’s keep is?

Yennefer presses her lips together in a scowl. He mirrors her, resolute.

She sighs after a moment and shakes her head. It’s over, for now. She picks the chainmail off the floor and examines it in her lap.

“How’s the hand?” she asks.

He clenches his right hand reflexively. Tries to clench it, anyway. The little finger and ring finger curl weakly into his palm; the top knuckles of the other fingers make an effort as well. But his first two fingers and his thumb only get so far as a quarter bent before they start shaking and the pain starts flaring once again, and he forces the whole hand to relax.

“Fine,” he says.

“Have the salves been helping with the pain?”

“A bit.”

“Mm,” Yennefer says. “Well, they help more if you actually use them.”

Geralt, in spite of himself, huffs out a laugh. He doesn’t know why he bothers trying to fool her anymore. After all these years. All these monsters. She’s the hardest to pin down.

“Come to bed,” she whispers, extending a hand to him. “If you don’t, I’ll have to suffer Jaskier alone, and even you wouldn’t leave me to that, surely.”

He stands with her, as much weight against her as he dares, and lets her lead him back to bed.

* * *

“Brought two playthings for you tonight, Witcher. Paid extra to have you both at once, they said. See if this’ll finally rip you in two. No, nope, none of that, _down_.

“I said, **down.**

“See? There’s a good boy. Knows how to listen if you just persuade him a little.

“Have at him, gentlemen. Don’t worry about damages. It’s fun to hear him scream all the way across the garden.”

* * *

“Geralt. _Geralt_.”

He starts awake. He’s warm, bathed in gold; must’ve cast Quen on instinct in his sleep, he thinks, and it’s only when he tries to drop it that he remembers he can’t make his hands form Signs anymore.

He blinks. Jaskier’s hovering over him, fingers tracing out an inverted triangle against the deadened skin of Geralt’s hand.

“Hmm,” Geralt says, because he doesn’t know what else he’s supposed to say.

“Yennefer’s been teaching me,” Jaskier says. As soon as he stops twitching his fingers, the Sign drops. “While you’ve been dozing the days away.”

Geralt sits up on his elbows. He looks around; the room’s empty, but still smells like her.

“She went to get some water for you as soon as you started making noise in your sleep,” Jaskier says. “Sit back, sit back. She’ll be back soon.”

“I’m not a child,” Geralt rasps.

“No,” Jaskier agrees. “No. But sit back. Sleep. Here, I can try again; I’ll practice without having to touch, this time.”

Sparks of warm white-gold, and then a rumbling white noise, like a waterfall.

* * *

Seventeen across on the ceiling and the narrower walls. Forty-one for the ceiling length. Height is fifty-four on one end and fifty-six on the other; it slopes up with the roof.

* * *

By the time spring melt comes to Temeria, the edges of Geralt’s hair reach his shoulders, his hand only truly pains him in the most humid of weather, and he still hasn’t so much as gotten his mouth on either Jaskier or Yennefer.

Before all this, they were insatiable. The two of them, the three of them. The colliding of them all. The sweet noises Jaskier made when he was being fucked were as melodic as any ballad he sang; Yennefer’s heady scent of arousal mixed with the perfume she seemed to bathe in put him gently away to sleep at night. And it lit a fire in his stomach: seeing them, touching them. Watching them touch each other, tentative and exploratory, just because they wanted to see more of what the other saw in him. It was a drug like nothing else.

Now he sleeps between them, but they don’t fuck. They don’t even seem to think of it. The only time they’d tried, a month afterwards at Geralt’s own insistence, he’d gone quiet and taut as soon as he was on his knees and only came back to awareness with his head in Yennefer’s lap and Jaskier humming a tune while tracing nonsense designs into the skin of his back.

So they hadn’t tried again.

It isn’t forever, he knows. Precious little is. But it is _now_ , and that’s what stings, every time desire for them stirs and then quiets again inside his chest.

Now, at least, to let them see him undressed doesn’t frighten the traitorous parts of his memory. He sinks into a bath that’s perpetually hot; Jaskier always complains about the temperature, and Yennefer never makes it any cooler. Geralt likes the scorching heat of it, the way it works its way into the viscera of his muscles, lets his shoulders drop from where they sit always on alert.

Jaskier, for his part, takes his role as washroom assistant very seriously. He washes what’s left of Geralt’s hair, carefully working in all the oils and soaps he would have used if it were still long and in need of maintenance. He presses deft fingers into Geralt’s shoulders, the arches of his feet.

He rolls out Geralt’s ankles, stretching the tendons that were slashed and grew back too crooked to allow him to run. He massages the blood back into Geralt’s hand, where it gets stiff and painful and always feels numb.

“Have you thought any more about that position at Oxenfurt?” Jaskier asks, as if it’s Geralt’s decision to make. “I know it’s not the most glamorous life. But it’d be steady work for me and you could — I don’t know. You’d be one hell of a guest lecturer.”

Geralt grunts. The job offer — full professor of musical theory — had come two weeks ago; Jaskier had cycled in the following twenty-four hours between elation and outrage.

“Yeah, me too,” Jaskier sighs. “And Yennefer wouldn’t last the day.”

A smile spreads across Geralt’s face. Yennefer, in a city; Yennefer, beholden to the rules of the academy. Gods preserve them.

“Not that, then,” Jaskier says; Geralt can hear his smile in his voice. “What about Vesemir?”

Geralt’s eyes snap open.

He tries to stand and leave the bath; Jaskier’s hands hover over his shoulders, not pressing but insistent. “Geralt, hey, come on,” he says. “Stop that. It’s been, what, over a month now. You can’t do the whole silent brooding thing forever.”

Geralt stares long enough to try to prove him wrong.

“Okay,” Jaskier sighs. “Okay. Alright. At least let me finish working this truly horrendous knot out of your back.”

They’re wrapped in soft linen nightshirts once Jaskier’s managed to wrestle the rest of a bath out of him. Yennefer’s still working on some complicated runes downstairs; it’s just the two of them, pressed nearly face-to-face in bed above the covers. Like so many tavern rooms of days gone by.

In the hazy candlelight, he can see Jaskier’s face perfectly. The shape of his brow, the narrowed eyes with pupils wide and straining. He wonders what Jaskier sees of him. Hazy outlines, maybe. The hint of a mouth, a nose, a face.

“Geralt,” Jaskier says quietly. “I’m going to ask you questions, and I want you to try to humor me, alright?”

Geralt exhales. His chest is tight. It shouldn’t be. It should be getting easier to breathe.

“Alright,” he says.

Jaskier’s fingers trace down the seams of his shirt, up the lace of his buttons.

“You told me Witchers don’t retire,” he whispers. Geralt closes his eyes. “But surely you can’t be the only Witcher to ever suffer a career-ending injury.”

Geralt aches. His hand, his legs, his lungs.

“No,” he says. “I’m not.”

Jaskier nods. “What happened to them?”

Geralt opens his mouth. He closes it again.

He can’t say it. He owes it to Jaskier to say it. But he can’t; he doesn’t know how. Or he knows how, but it’s too heavy. Like picking up his silver sword in a hand that can’t make a fist any longer.

Jaskier breathes, though. He knows. He’s known. “That’s what I thought.”

Senseless anger, then, surges in Geralt. He thinks of all the Witchers he used to know who left the Path the only way Witchers know how, chosen or not. He thinks of Jaskier, asking him to be so selfish as to keep imposing upon the world a Witcher that can’t even save them any longer.”

“And how long do you think you would last?” Geralt snaps, feeling the words burn up his throat all the while. “If you lost your poetry. Not your voice, or your beauty, or even--even your ability to write down words. None of that. Your ability to _compose_. To _think_. If you’d — if you suffered some brain injury so that you can’t form a rhyme, can’t even recognize a tune, but you could still remember the feeling it gave you when you could. Do you think you’d live long like that? Could you?”

Geralt’s heart is hammering in his chest.

Somewhere under it, he can hear Jaskier’s as well; steady and calm. Like it had been waiting for his to catch up.

Jaskier puts a hand to Geralt’s cheek. He brushes his fingers into his hair, against the thick lines of overlapping scars.

He says, infuriatingly self-assured of the answer, “Can you look me in the eye and tell me all I’m worth is the songs I write?”

* * *

This man is the fourth one. The first was the captor, the hunter, whatever he wanted to call himself; the bastard who got lucky and brought down a Witcher. The second was the mage they brought to drug him and keep him quiet, testing out his own handiwork; the third was the one who carved into his ankles to hear him shout and left him bleeding on the stone floor.

He promises himself he’ll keep track. This is the fourth one; the man who digs his heel into Geralt’s neck and presses down as he raises a whip above his head to bring it down in a crack against Geralt’s spine. It stings, and it’s not anything worse than anything Geralt’s felt before, except that he can’t fight against it. He can’t turn and run his sword through this man’s stomach; he can’t push himself to his knees and wrestle him to the ground. He is splayed out, pinned; he is cracked and raw and bleeding; he is pouring every ounce of himself into _survive. Survive. Survive._

“Gods, you’re pretty,” the man says admiringly, and he brings the whip down again, again, again.

Geralt’s back is in ribbons by the time he’s finished, and then he hauls Geralt up by the hips and sinks into him with no prelude, just the raw tearing of skin that would force a scream from Geralt’s throat except that he’s not here anymore. He’s somewhere else, sealed off, untouchable. Somewhere with the memory of lilac and gooseberries and chamomile tea.

“Come on, now,” the man tells Geralt’s body. “Come on, let’s hear you.”

He grabs a fistful of Geralt’s hair; without stopping, he pulls a knife from his belt. The thrusts rattle Geralt’s body, jolt him back and forth erratically, and then the man’s knife is to his scalp and then it’s digging in and then oh, he’s back, he didn’t ask to be back, but the pain blooms so sharp and clean across his skull as the knife cuts in that he lets out a guttural noise that makes the man laugh and then drop his hair except —

No, he’s still holding Geralt’s hair. The skin came loose. Carved it out.

Geralt shuts his eyes as blood pools into his ears, and laughter peals throughout the cabin.

* * *

“Go to sleep, darling,” Yennefer whispers. He hasn’t slept in two days. Three. The nightmares don’t stop, when he does. Blades and fingers and rope and brick. “Go to sleep. You’re safe here.”

“Yennefer,” he says. He doesn’t know how to say anything else. He feels feverish. Stupid. Useless.

“Yes,” she says. “I’m here. Lay down, come on. Did I ever tell you about the time at Aretuza that Triss and I got blissfully high off our _arses_ on their greenhouse herbs? Let me tell you while you go on to sleep…”

“No,” he says. He hasn’t said it in months. There wasn’t any point. “No.”

“It’s okay,” she says. He wants so desperately to believe her. “It’s okay.”

* * *

“Aren’t you going to ask what I want?”

Knife sliding under the skin, the bone. Digging into the meat and muscle of his forearm, creeping up, up, the metal taste of blood in the air as he goes, unrelenting.

“You don’t want anything,” Geralt slurs. Focus. Draw yourself away from the pain. Start counting--one, two. Five. Bricks stretch across the ceiling. Seventeen, one end to the other.

“That’s not true.” Deeper. Blade slips in deeper.

He feels something snap —

Oh, fuck. Fire spasms up his arm, all the way into the shoulder, eating from the inside out it’s a nerve they’ve severed a nerve is this what he’s done to people all this time and for a moment he thinks he blacks out before adrenaline kick-starts him back again, back into the screaming and endless pain.

“Oh, hit something there, did I?”

Geralt’s teeth clatter. He’s cold. He’s dying. What a simple way to die. Flayed open by a human’s knife.

“What I _want_ , Butcher, is to hear you beg.”

Should have thought of that, Geralt thinks, before you killed me.

  
  


  
  


_go to Oxenfurt, next winter. Weather’s nicer there. Spring comes early, it_

  
  


_thought you liked surprises. Come on, close your eyes. Promise I won't turn you into a toad or anything. You’ll like_

  
  


_high up on the mountain_

  
  


_where_

  
  


_Geralt?_

  
  


  
  


Consciousness slams into him like a blast of pure chaos. His arm is wrenched behind his back, he can tell from the twist of his shoulder, his cheekbone to the ground, but he can’t feel it, he can’t feel any of it, it’s gone numb and it doesn’t matter that someone’s fucking into him and laughing, taunting him about finally waking up; his arm’s gone dead. It’s gone. It’s over. It’s over.

* * *

_Geralt,_

_Let’s not bullshit. I heard stories of what happened. Even if half of them are true, I feel a great sympathy for what you have suffered._

_If in particular reports of the nature of your injuries are true, then, well, I know you and the manner in which you may be tempted now to leave the Path. In truth, since your performance in the Trials, I have found it difficult to imagine your leaving in any other way._

_I cannot make another man’s decision for him, but know this: the doors of Kaer Morhen are always open for you (and, if you must, for your bard and your sorceress). No payment is required for your stay._

_With Sincerity,_

_Vesemir_

* * *

He doesn’t know which parts were dreams and which were wakefulness, after they got him out. The fiery pain of his mangled hand being fruitlessly stitched together seemed real; the sounds of quiet singing in the back of his mind seemed dreamlike. Fingers shaking as they skim over the rough-shorn patches of hair and flayed scalp: real. Hands that trail down his body and peel off, in layers, all the grime and dirt and scars and marks that marr his mottled skin: dreams.

The soft spoken prayers muttered at his bedside seemed somewhere in between. Neither the Yennefer nor the Jaskier he knew when he had disappeared would have been caught dead praying over him.

Perhaps they’re gone now, though.

* * *

He allows Yennefer to braid his hair at the last camp they make before they arrive. It’s gotten long enough, now; the edge of that scar is still visible where it’s patchier in the middle, but Jaskier assures him it’s not so noticeable as he fears.

“You’d have to be looking for it,” Jaskier tells him. “And I know you always are.”

He is; of course he is. He’ll always be looking for it, in passing glances in mirrors. He’ll never like having hands to his throat again, probably, and he’ll never stop reaching for a glass with the wrong hand before realizing it won’t hold it properly. He’ll have nightmares about that cabin for the next couple of decades, the way he’s had nightmares about the Trials for the last couple.

But his hand only aches in awful weather. His legs don’t long so much to run. And his throat doesn’t itch for the point of a silvered sword.

The mountain path proves easier than he feared, both for himself and for Jaskier. Yennefer has no problems at all, though maybe she’s pretending; she’s good at pretending. They reach the stone walls of the keep before the sun even sets over the horizon.

“Might be in time for dinner,” Yennefer says. “If you can work up the courage to knock.”

He tries to scowl at her. The smile on her face makes it difficult, as usual.

He raps the brass knocker against the door before he can think of it too much. One, two, three.

The silence stretches thin; and then, with the creaking of an ancient wooden door opening again, it snaps.

Vesemir smiles. “Geralt,” he says, stepping easily aside. “Welcome home.”

**Author's Note:**

> I am [on twitter](https://www.twitter.com/besselfcn) for yelling, or in the comments down below.


End file.
